NASA New Horizons - Pluto Flyby

What an amazing achievement to man kind. After New Horizons lifted off Earth in January 2006, it travelled 9 and a half YEARS in space for 3 BILLION plus miles, to visit Pluto system for the first time in history.

New Horizons has just passed the closest approach to Pluto a few minutes ago. What an amazing photo of Pluto:

New Horizons will take whole bunch of photos and lots of measurements, and it would take 18 MONTHS to send all the data back to earth due to the vast distance the signal would need to travel. Even light takes 4.5 HOURS to reach between Pluto and Earth. It is that far.